


Cyberpunk 'Verse

by thingswithwings



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Cyberpunk, Cyborgs, Gen, Multi, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-03-28
Updated: 2003-08-10
Packaged: 2017-10-24 00:48:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/256988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithwings/pseuds/thingswithwings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A little cyberpunk AU series that I never finished.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Binary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lij blinks, and his eyes shuffle and whirr from cobalt blue to turquoise green.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> note: this chapter contains cyborg-style noncon; one character has programmed the sexual responses of the other.

Lij blinks, and his eyes shuffle and whirr from cobalt blue to turquoise green. The world sighs and buys as his genuine grin software takes over the advurt screen with sensuous lips and hard brightwhite enamel, with that v8.2 flash of ironic delight and delicious intimacy. Every motion: a smooth white hand pushed down a smooth white neck, a tongue run out to moisten nanobot-swollen lips, a quick flicking of dark hair out of vivid eyes: every move calculated and controlled by the new interactive uplink.

Bi77y watches, taken in even by his own creation, and grins a little as the numbers come rolling in. They can now monitor and respond to consumer response even as they create it through v8.2: the Lijlink is hooked in to the consumer datalink, both feeding off of each other. The targetmarks are buying. Not buying soap powder or hair cream, not anymore; they’re buying the advurt. They’re buying Lij, paying for the privilege of watching him sell himself, and they’re doing it in record numbers.

The global attention span isn’t much, though, especially among the real hard to get targmarks. Bi77y knows just how to play them. He cuts off the Lij-vurt just as the peak turns into a curve, just as Lij’s nanobots darken and lengthen his hair in response to consumer desire, just as Lij runs his newly-tanned hands through that messy black hair and opens his mouth as if to speak. Bi77y cuts off the feed, softcoring out the image and shunting his feedcontrol over to the next bidder. The interactive consumer link is severed, too, and as v8.2 saunters back into the control room his bots are already putting his flawless, unmarked, hyperhuman body back to default settings.

Lij walks over to his programmer and begins the work of disengaging the mess of wires and shunts and cables from the wetware that sprouts from Bi77y’s skin like silicon flowers. Bi77y always takes time to come down after he’s been inside the uplink for a while, his electrodes twitching with the phantom memory of electronic input. It takes a few minutes for his brain functions to be transferred back to his cortex, but once they are, he grins an impossibly wide, infectious grin that makes Lij wonder, insofar as he is capable of wonder, why Bi77y didn’t become an advurt himself. Maybe he craves the rough scrape of mechanized ports in his flesh: something real, solid – something genuinely human in the nanotekked world.

“We made it, boy. Record numbers.”

Lij grins, the prettiest grin on world advurts by the new numbers, and helps his programmer to stand. Bi77y’s pale flesh shows almost translucent against his softly clicking implants. His thin hand comes up to scratch absently at the metaport at the base of his skull as he stretches out his other arm, skin pulling satisfyingly against black nests of wires and ports.

“D’you wanna celebrate, then?” Bi77y arches an eyebrow, the fine line of brown hairs pulling away from the metal and plastic that jacks into his left eye socket.

Lij grins again and nods, his hair falling seductively into his eyes. This is Bi77y’s favourite addition to v.8.2; actual randomized and self-motivated sexual desire to go with the hypersexuality of the performance. Bi77y had designed it himself, true, but not before asking v6.5 or whatever Lij had been then whether he wanted it. Since then, the programming had only become more refined.

Most of the memory in Lij’s very human brain was devoted to maintaining and coordinating his nanobots and to interacting with the uplink without the use of external implants. Bi77y had to overwrite Lij’s speech centres to make room for the newest software: it’s the price you pay if you want flawless advurt-quality flesh and not the cyborg mess that Bi77y inhabits. But Bi77y spends most of his offtime mapping and remapping the boy’s brain, giving him back as much of himself as he can without compromising the programs. Unlike most vurtbots, Lij v8.2 has the senses of smell, taste, and touch to go along with sight and hearing; he has the ability to learn and to reason and to understand speech; and, as Bi77y had never touched the limbic system, he can still feel emotion.

It’s more than just software. It is.

Lij begins with featherlight touches along Bi77y’s hardware: arms and neck especially, the sensitive joining of skin and ports and processors worshipped by Lij’s perfect pink tongue and soft, uncalloused fingertips. The eyes, back to cobalt blue (default), widen in happiness as Bi77y shivers with the delicious pressure. The programmer grasps Lij’s face in his hands and they meet in soft flesh-kisses, lip to lip, Lij’s tongue trailing away now and then to explore the line-out port below the ear, behind the jaw. Bi77y peels off his vurtbot’s clothes, lapping and biting at perfectly round, dark nipples as he edges them towards the rumpled bed in the shadowed corner.

He pushes Lij down onto the blankets, his soft mouth sucking gently at the boy’s navel while his implant-covered arms scrape and frot deliciously against his ribs. Sweat begins to break out and bead on Lij’s skin, and Bi77y licks it up eagerly, taking in the endorphin-producing nanobots that allow Bi77y to get high on his boy’s arousal before they die of separation from their host. Lij is finished with his programmer’s shirt and is working on the jeans, caressing as he goes, still getting them both closer to naked, closer to that beautiful skin-on-metal-on-skin rasp that drives them both crazy. v8.2’s soft fingers find the processing unit at the base of Billy’s cock, tickle biochips, stroke skin, follow the implant to where it meets hard flesh.

Bi77y’s pushing down Lij’s trousers, now, nuzzling his ocular implant against that soft, good-smelling crease between hip and cock. Pushing his mouth onto Lij’s flesh, sucking softly, dragging his teeth lightly down the sides to simulate the scrape of arms against the vurtbot’s hips and torso against his thick, stretching thighs. Lij arches up, and his sweat and precome carries more of his little bliss-bots into Bi77y’s mouth, forming a feedback loop of sexual intoxication between macro and micro circuits. Bi77y’s implants begin to hum, ports opening ravenously, outgoing lines beginning to twist, snakelike, of their own volition. Lij, panting wordlessly, presses his fingers down into the ports closest to him, on Bi77y’s shoulders and chest, and they close hungrily on him, piercing skin and drawing in bot-laden blood. There are so many bots in him now, in his blood, that he can feel them buzzing beneath his skin, feel them talking to each other in pleasure-commands. They converge on his cock, his nipples, his balls, his prostate, rubbing, creating the sensation of rubbing, pulling, licking. He feels himself thrusting into the illusory warmth and resistance they create for him even as he takes in Lij’s flesh in real-space. Bi77y is hard, wriggling against the sheets as Lij’s nanobots and the little computer that encircles the base of his cock work together to send shocks of pleasure racing to his CPU.

Lij cries out as the ports devour his fingers, and Bi77y can tell through his endorphin haze that the vurtbot is close now. He sucks hungrily, ports and mouth, and Lij thrusts up into him, pushes down into him, and comes, surging onto his tongue. The final dose of second-hand bots are all Bi77y needs to comes himself, and he collapses, panting, against Lij’s thigh. His ports disengage, and Lij removes his fingers, the cuts already being tended to by invisible medibots.

Bi77y feels the boy’s hands in his sparse hair, stroking softly, and he smiles. His ocular implant is trying to refocus around the sweat that’s dripped onto it, and he wipes it in irritation before crawling up next to the perfect body on the bed, trailing loose wires as he goes. He wraps cool arms and legs around the flushed body, fingertips soothing the machine-scratches that haven’t been repaired yet.

He strokes his mechanized hands slowly down v8.2’s smooth shoulder, down and then back up, over and over, a quiet, soothing rhythm. He brushes wires and hair out of his eyes so that he can put his forehead against the vurtbot’s.

“That was nice, Lij.”

Lij nods, smiling softly, but his eyelids are heavy, and begin to fall as the boy’s sleep algorithms take over. Bi77y tries to avoid abrading the skin as he strokes the boy’s shoulder, does his best to love without leaving a mark.

“We’ve got about an hour before your next spot,” Bi77y whispers to his creation. “Don’t worry. I’ll wake you.”


	2. Binary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cate loves the poetry inherent in a single bot creating cascade reactions, the power found in the right moment and placement and the perfect programming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> references to prostitution and drug addiction. this chapter owes a debt to Douglas Rushkoff's novel Ecstasy Club.

Lij blinks, and his eyes shuffle and whirr from cobalt blue to turquoise green.

Cate unplugs from the advurt screen, forcing herself away from the latest vurtbot sensation before it can con anything out of her. She’d kill to get her hands on some of the nanobots that went into forming that pretty face, but good as she is, it’s not her scene. The programming needed to coordinate that kind of system is too tedious for her, too cold. Cate loves the poetry inherent in a single bot creating cascade reactions, the power found in the right moment and placement and the perfect programming.

In addition to the metaport at the base of her skull, Cate has a small set of imbedded tech implants – a fairly standard ocular enhancement over her left eye and several highly illegal, highly sophisticated tools that emerge from her fingertips like claws. She bends over the nanobots she’s working on, black spikes of hair falling into her human eye, and activates the tiny pad of silicon and metal that smooths over her left index finger. Through her ocular implant, she sees the bots begin to organize, looking for human glands to stimulate.

Bliss-bots. Endorphin-kickers. Annoyingly simple to make, at least as far as she’s concerned, and relentlessly boring once finished, but they pay for the more experimental nanojunk that she loves to see in action. This batch is done now, but not active, and without her activation codes, they can’t penetrate into a body or find the right receptor sites in the brain. Cate runs a flesh-finger along the slide and the bots come swarming up her skin, eager to complete their programmed function. The little enclave flocks to her wrist, to the pulse-point there, basking in the heat and railing against the flesh that prohibits their access. A word from her, and they’d be in through her pores, racing through her bloodstream to her brain. Making her feel good.

She picks up a little vial, electromagnetized on the inside, and collects her creations.

“Sorry, luvs, it isn’t the time,” she whispers to the black metal casing.

“S’always the t-time.” From behind her.

 _How the fuck?_ She wheels around, preparing to activate one of the nastier bits of her illegal hardware.

“D-d-don’t shoot me, Cate, please, I need...” Orli’s eyes track down to the vial in her other hand. Cate’s jaw locks and she drops the little black tube on the floor between them. Orli dives down after it, greedy, fingers clawing for it, desperate. His hands almost close on it when a scuffed black boot connects with his head and sends him flying across the room, his back skidding across the concrete floor.

He tries to move, tries to get back up, but Cate is on him, knees pinning down his legs, metal-clad hands pinning his wrists above his head. Her face is inches from his own. Her left eye tracks the little impulses racing across his skin as his face heats and sweat breaks out.

“Now perhaps you could tell me, luv,” she says softly, “just how the fuck you got into my lab.” Her last words emerge in a nearly sub-audible growl, low and menacing.

“I...the door was...”

“No, it wasn’t. How’d you get in, Or?” She shifts her weight, bringing one knee down hard onto the big artery in Orli’s thigh. He’s kicking now, trying to flip them over or throw off her hands, but despite a few wiry muscles he’s too weak, used up by the virus, and can’t budge her.

“I...ow, I, please, Cate, I just need...”

She grins with just a few too many teeth and leans in close. “I know what you need, baby. Tell me how you got in.”

Orli squirms under the pressure, _twitch-reset,_ and gives in. “Handel gave me the door code.”

“You sure about that?” She’s so close now, close enough to bite, close enough to let his blood onto the concrete.

“Yes, Cate, please, just...” Orli’s body begins to convulse: _twitch-reset, twitch-reset,_ the virus scrambling important inpho in his brain. Cate stands, grimaces, then heaves the body up off of the floor. He’s far too thin, true, but he’s still heavy enough that it takes her considerable time to lever him onto the bench. Picking up the fallen vial of nanojunk, she inputs the activation code and injects it into what flesh she can find on Orli’s bare arm. He stops twitching as the bots flood his system with designer opiates, restarting the system and forcing the virus to unscramble a whole new code.

His eyes open all at once, as if he’s expecting to wake up somewhere bad. He sees Cate sitting across from him on the workbench and manages a deep breath.

“Cate I...”

“You owe me for seven of those now.”

“I’ll pay, Cate, I...”

“You’re not going to have any customers if you keep losing weight. Your looks aren’t so pretty anymore, luv.”

“It’s the virus.” Softly. As though he’s too ashamed to admit it. As though she wasn’t there when he first started showing glitches.

Cate hesitates. “I could defrag you, you know. Do up an anti-virus.”

He clenches his jaw, annoyed. “I can’t afford that.”

She smiles, shuffles closer to him on the bench, throws an arm around him genially. “Orli, my boy, I will happily do it on cred.”

He glances incredulously at the hand on his shoulder, then arches his pretty-boy eyebrow. “Whaddyou want? I offered before, you said...”

“I’m not risking picking up your fractal, darling, even if we do deactivate it. And you really do need to put on weight.”

“So...”

“You’re not the first person Handel’s sent in here.”

“Yeah, I got that impression when he sent me the code.”

Cate nods. “I need to be able to get to him, Or.”

“You want me to find Handel? Then what, hack Central and go celibate?”

She gives him that grin again, the one with too many teeth. This time, though, it’s an adorable kind of terrifying.

“You don’t need to find him, honey. You just need to work your underfed charms on him. Get his inpho, little boy, and you get all the bliss-bots you can suck down.”

“And you’ll fix me.” How long’s it been since there was any hope mixed in with the viral code in those puppy-dog brown eyes?

She drops the bravado. A real smile this time. “I’ll do my best.” And cradles his head in her leathermetal hands, and pulls him towards her, and kisses his forehead. He closes his eyes, holds on to the feeling of her soft lips that lingers on his body, and

 _twitch-reset_


	3. Random Access Memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She's going to die at the hands of some two-bit underfunded fednark fleshbot, and fuck if she didn't plan it out, step by step.

Cate steps out onto the street and knows that someone is following her. She palms the illegal hardware she's just purchased, disappearing the silicone slivers into the folds of her jacket, and begins to walk. She breathes deeply, keeping her heart rate and adrenaline levels down. She doesn't want to give up the game this early.

From behind her comes the whirr-clunk sound of a tecched-up body moving quickly.

She walks, oblivious. The cybercop follows.

A block or so later, Cate reaches up and tucks a loose strand of black hair behind her ear. As she does so, a tiny needle emerges from her finger and grazes the skin at her temple, sending her latest creations rushing into her bloodstream, looking for the fast-track to her brain. And there's a reason that she's the best in the business; she imagines that she can _feel_ the little buggers finding the appropriate receptor sites. She immediately feels the sweat break out at her temples, damping down the soft hair there. Her breathing picks up, and her heart begins to hammer in her chest. Then the adrenaline hits her, and she wonders if she shouldn't be selling this stuff to junkies.

Those soft little whirr-chink noises start to come faster, sounding deceptively slow as the night-time horror of little city children sprints towards her at a decidedly inhuman pace, hearing and smelling the infra-red guilt. The adrenaline isn't all manufactured, now, and there's a cold clammy feeling of fear in her stomach.

Well, the show will be authentic, at least, and there's no backing out now.

She's running before she even realises it.

The fast-flashing brick and steel and dirt blends into one endless smear as she sprints through muddy alleyways, jumps unconscious nanojunkies and mods, cuts through abandoned buildings. She begins to lose track of where she is, but she keeps running, chasing past streets she doesn't recognize, the swift little machine-noises behind her getting steadily louder as the Cybercop gains. The image of some absurd faun-and-nymph tableau from a Grecian urn, done up in metal and leather, flashes into Cate's mind and if the wind weren't wrenching the breath from her lungs, she might laugh.

But laughing becomes the furthest thing from her thoughts as her lungs begin to burn with the strain and the long muscles in her legs start screaming at her. She feels locked in flight, frozen in time, and it's almost a relief when a metalflesh hand clamps down on her shoulder and slams her into the alley wall.

Her head cracks against the bricks behind her and she wonders disjointedly whether this was perhaps a very bad idea.

The ricochet off of the brick knocks away what little breath was left in her body, but she lifts her head anyway, drags her eyes upwards. Cate looks into the cop's eyes for the briefest of seconds and knows, cold and sure, that she's made a terrible mistake. She anticipates the feel of built-in weaponry slamming through her flesh. She can feeling it coming, taste the metallic tang on her tongue.

She's going to die at the hands of some two-bit underfunded fednark fleshbot, and fuck if she didn't plan it out, step by step.

Her punch is loaded with all of the illegal weapons she would never have used on Orli, but it's blocked, her arm twisted back painfully. The cop pinches off circulation to her wrists, and her implants twitch and slither uselessly around her fingers. A horribly cold metal voice pushes into her belly in the place of government bullets.

"Hi, Catie. I've missed you."

And lips against her own, and tongue, and teeth, and she scratches at his face with her free hand and pushes her tongue into his mouth, scrabbling desperately for purchase against his wire-and-armour body. She's still panting from the bot-induced fear as her fingernails screech on metal in her search for flesh. He releases her arm entirely, then lifts her from her shoulders and slams her back into the wall again, holding her up above him. Cate grinds against the cold body, using the position to scrabble her hands desperately under the layers of rubber and wires, finding familiar flesh, old scars, the memories of freckles on sunless skin. He's thrusting against her, hard against her hip, and she digs her fingers into his shoulders, bringing her knees around him like a vice. His teeth dig into her collarbone.

His rough hands peel the sticky leather off of her hips, pushing and scraping at her bare skin. She fingers for the release-buttons on his body armour. Blue-grey lips crush against hers, awkward and desperate, as their hands tear and slide aside metal and leather and she thrusts once and he's finally inside her, hot and pulsing and alive. Cate bites her lip and tries to ignore the machine-noises behind his movements as he buries himself in her, tries to ignore the wires her mouth finds on the way to lips and tongue.

She's pinned against the wall by his body, his hands greedy on her breasts and hips. He pulls back and then thrusts forward, hard, pushing her further into the brick. She grips his shoulders and finds his lips again, biting and licking and panting against his neck.

He strokes into her, moving faster, the machine-noises of his body impossible to shut out. She closes her eyes and shudders tighter around him, her skin too hot in the damp alleyway. His thrusts are erratic now, uncontrolled, abortive, and she meets him with the spasms of her own hips, pleasure roaring through her. She almost calls his name. She pants for air and feels him go still, groaning, his breathing harsh and shallow and loud. Hot against her breast in the cool dirty air. He rests his still-cool armoured forehead against her shoulder.

Cate takes a deep breath and brings her legs down from his sides. "It's good to see you, Sean."

He pulls out of her and away, enclosing himself again in his body armour and his black rubber. "2447," he says. Twenty-four-forty-seven, he always says it like that, not according to the approved alpha-bravo-cuntface two-four-four-seven procedure. And maybe that means something, that he makes a name of his anonymity.

She pulls her clothes back into place and runs a sticky hand through her hair. "Fine."

He's silent for a long time. Then, "I should take you in, buying off the street like that. Stupid." His infrared eye tracks to the tiny pockets in her sleeve where the new hardware is so poorly concealed.

"I need it."

"You're going to get arrested."

"Right now?"

He glares at her with his one human eye, and she glares back with hers.

"Fuck you, Cate, no. Not now."

"I need something done."

"I can't help you."

"I need your help, Seanie."

"Twenty-four forty-seven!" he yells suddenly, a long-ago lock of that sandy brown hair escaping from the grafted-on helmet and the tangle of wires. She thinks of the way it used to look before he got the body-armour, always just a little too long. She thinks of the way he used to brush it out of his eyes and look annoyed and say _fine, catie, you can sleep with me, then,_ even though she was older and he should've been the one afraid of monsters. She remembers the warmth of his body almost viscerally.

And she turns to walk away. Not towards the shop; she's not that stupid.

His voice follows her, and she almost hears his own accent under the cold, government-issue monotone. "What is it, Cate?"

She turns. "I need a favour from my little brother, not a Fednark reel-to-reel of me recounting my recent illegal activities."

A rusty laugh comes out of his mouth. "I turned off the uplink to headquarters when I saw you."

She doubts, and he sees it. "Check for yourself, then," comes his bitter invitation.

She does, a fine metal filigree emerging from the first knuckle on her left hand and probing into the CPU on the side of his head. "Okay, then," she says softly.

"What is it you want, Catie?" In that tone of voice that says that he won't do it.

"I need you to wipe the record on Orli. The whole thing going back at least ten years."

"He's a registered fractal-carrier, Cate, I can't just..."

"You can. You can hack it, I know you can. Please do this for me." She touches him again, her fingers pressing hesitatingly into his arm.

"He'll infect people."

"I'm going to fix him." Daring him to tell her that she can't, or that curing fractals is illegal.

"I'll..." he hesitates for a long moment. "Okay. When I hook up again, I'll try. I won't make promises."

"I think we're left promises behind." Her voice soft and tired.

"Yeah." He fidgets with his gun-arm.

"Thank you, twenty-four forty-seven." She smiles and leans forward to kiss him, her tongue slipping slowly and sweetly into his mouth. She pulls back, and then hesitates. "I've missed you, too."

"I see you sometimes. I watch for you."

"I know. I see you, too."

"We can't ever do this again, Catie."

She laughs quietly. "That's what you said the first time."

His smile is part sorrow and half-hidden by the faceplate.

She pulls away, her fingers cold where she's no longer touching him. She shakes her head as if disagreeing. "No, we can't ever do this again. But keep watching for me, okay?"

He nods. "Okay, Catie."

"I love you, Sean." This last in a whisper, her voice breaking, and she stands up on her tiptoes to place a chaste kiss beside his mouth. Sean closes his eyes. A tear escapes, but is caught and hidden by the mesh of wires and metal that crisscross his cheek. Her warm lips leave ghosts on his skin.

When he opens his eyes, she's faded into the city.


End file.
